Stephen Baxter

The third novel in the Long Earth series. 2040-2045: When her long-lost father, the inventor of the original Stepper device, contacts her, Sally joins him on an ill-fated voyage to Long Mars, while U.S. Navy Commander Maggie Kauffman leads an expedition to the outer limits of the far Long Earth, and Joshua becomes embroiled in the plight of the Next.

A woman stumbles upon a mysterious portal that links back to the Firstborn, omnipotent beings responsible for the upheaval of history and the creators of the notorious black monolith of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Failing to eliminate life on Earth after their first attack, the Firstborn send a Q-bomb weapon to finish the job. Two cryogenically frozen females and a group of scientists studying the Eye, an artifact of the Firstborn, may be the only hope of finding a way to counter the onslaught.

The Next--the hyper-intelligent post-humans--realize that the missive they received from the center of the galaxy contains instructions for kick-starting the development of an immense artificial intelligence knows as The Machine. But to build this computer the size of an Earth continent, they must obtain help from the more populous and still industrious worlds of mankind.

"In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the endlessly-mysterious moon is explored in this reprint short science fiction anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld, The Best Science Fiction of the Year). On July 20, 1969, mankind made what had only years earlier seemed like an impossible leap forward: when Apollo 11 became the first manned mission to land on the moon, and Neil Armstrong the...